Why I Left 60 Minutes

Of course, my departure had nothing to do with either of these factors. Nor was it driven by any personal animus on my part toward Mike Wallace. Mike was certainly not the easiest man to work with, but I respected him and his enormous contribution to broadcast journalism, and appreciated the opportunity he had given me.

Many people, then and since, have asked me what exactly I was thinking—after all, I was walking away from a successful career full of future promise. Certainly, quitting 60 Minutes was the most impetuous thing I have ever done. But looking back, I realize how I’d changed. Beneath my polite, mild-mannered exterior, I’d developed a bullheaded determination not to be denied, misled or manipulated. And more than at any previous time, I had had a jarring epiphany that the obstacles on the way to publishing the unvarnished truth had become more formidable internally than externally. I joked to friends that it had become far easier to investigate the bastards—whoever they are—than to suffer through the reticence, bureaucratic hand-wringing and internal censorship of my employer.

In a highly collaborative medium, I had found myself working with overseers I felt I could no longer trust journalistically or professionally, especially in the face of public criticism or controversy—a common occupational hazard for an investigative reporter. My job was to produce compelling investigative journalism for an audience of 30 million to 40 million Americans. But if my stories generated the slightest heat, it was obvious to me who would be expendable. My sense of isolation and vulnerability was palpable.

The best news about this crossroads moment was that after 11 years in the intense, cutthroat world of network television news, I still had some kind of inner compass. I was still unwilling to succumb completely to the lures of career ambition, financial security, peer pressure or conventional wisdom.

Just weeks after I quit, I decided to begin a nonprofit investigation reporting organization—a place dedicated to digging deep beneath the smarminess of Washington’s daily-access journalism into the documents few reporters seemed to be reading, which I knew from experience would reveal broad patterns of cronyism, favoritism, personal enrichment and outrageous (though mostly legal) corruption. My dream was a journalistic utopia—an investigative milieu in which no one would tell me who or what not to investigate. And so I recruited two trusted journalist friends and founded the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s first report, “America’s Frontline Trade Officials,” was an expanded version of the 60 Minutes “Foreign Agent” story. Not long after this report was published, President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order banning former trade officials from becoming lobbyists for foreign governments or corporations.

Over the years, the center was the first news organization to analyze and post online all of the available financial disclosure statements for every state legislator in America, revealing numerous apparent conflicts of interest. It broke the Lincoln bedroom scandal first revealing that President Bill Clinton’s top donors had been rewarded with overnight stays in the White House. In February 2003, weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the center posted secret draft “Patriot II” legislation, and in October it posted all of the known U.S. war contracts in Afghanistan. In the past quarter-century, the center’s reporting has won more than 70 national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Goldsmith Prize and the George Polk award for three separate stories in 2014. Meanwhile, I now teach journalism at the American University School of Communication in Washington, and I am the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the largest university-based, nonprofit newsroom in the United States.

The center did amazingly well, today even becoming a venerable institution—employing 40 people full-time and it publishing scores of investigative stories a year. But it’s frustrating that it was ever necessary at all. Back in 1989 when I started it, major investigative reporting did not seem to be particularly valued by national news editors, whether in broadcasting or newspapers. Instead, they seemed satisfied merely to reactively report on the systemic abuses of power, trust and the law in Washington—from the Iran-Contra scandal to the savings and loan disaster to the first resignation of a House Speaker since 1800. There was very little proactive, original investigative journalism about these or other vitally important subjects, and, equally galling to me, there was smug arrogance and complacency instead of apologetic humility by those in the national press corps, despite their lackluster pursuit of such abuses of power.

And more than two decades later, it’s no better. With a third fewer commercial journalists than 20 years ago and public relations “spinners” now outnumbering professional reporters and editors by 4 to 1, the Center for Public Integrity and organizations like it are more necessary than ever. Fewer commercial news organizations support investigative journalism now than at any time in recent history, and reporters today—especially those who aggressively seek the truths that government, business and other powerful institutions seek to conceal—are arguably more alone, more exposed and more vulnerable to professional and even physical harm than they ever were.

There has to be a better way.

Charles Lewis is a national investigative journalist and founder of the Center for Public Integrity. He is a former ABC News and 60 Minutes producer and currently teaches journalism at American University School of Communication. This piece is excerpted from his book 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity, which was released last week.